


tell me i'm your national anthem

by corleones



Category: The Borgias
Genre: F/M, Incest, Modern AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-08-14
Updated: 2012-08-14
Packaged: 2017-11-12 03:43:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 897
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/486297
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/corleones/pseuds/corleones
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>At sixteen, a gypsy in a festival hall had told her fortune in tea leaves, predicted three husbands and three lovers. Lucrezia had laughed, pulled at the string of pearls around her neck. She had liked the symmetry of it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	tell me i'm your national anthem

As children, the years between them seemed long and wide. Chez grew so much faster than she did, his legs lanky, his limbs loose and Lucrezia left behind, tiny and sharp, all bones in her little white dresses. She remembers playing with his school ties at ten, then twelve and then sixteen. Sitting knees up on his bed, mirror propped up in front of her, making tight little knots with her fingers. She remembers his bedroom, like a cave, all dark and full of shadows and secrets. She remembers rummaging through the drawers to find his cigarettes and holding them in the curve of her mouth unlit, waiting in the black room for him to come in and find her.

They were always close, always but it was different when they were children with her brother always two steps ahead and Lucrezia always following. 

She is eighteen the year that this changes forever.

-

At sixteen, a gypsy in a festival hall had told her fortune in tea leaves, predicted three husbands and three lovers. Lucrezia had laughed, pulled at the string of pearls around her neck. She had liked the symmetry of it.

"I have three brothers, you know," she had whispered confidentially, voice thick with wine.

"And you love all your brothers?" the gypsy asked.

"One. One, I love very much."

-

All of her marriages are contracts, which should comfort her brother and his weak, hungry heart but he finds himself hating all of them, every last one.

Sforza spends his first night in Lucrezia's bed two weeks before the wedding, on a night that their parents spend in the country and Cesare hears the pad of two pairs of feet across the hall, two in the morning, Lucrezia's lilting laugh chased by a heavy drawl. He imagined her coat slipping off her shoulders, the fur finding the floor between the door and her bed, imagined Sforza tripping over it on his way over to her body, her pale limbs, long hair spread out on the sheets.

He imagines, he imagines, he tortures himself always. 

The Borgias know the value of money but they do not always know the value of love and Cesare, spends more of his heart on his sister than he will on any other woman ever.

This is the year it changes, she knows, they both know. The next morning, Lucrezia's smiling eyes over her cup of coffee meet his and the world they both inhabit is changed forever.

-

It is another two years before they sleep together, the passage of time and husbands makes them cold and then warm and he feels always as if he is missing a step with his sister, always as if he is hunting a ghost.

She is so close, a hallway across from him or a set of streets or a city, never further than that, no oceans or continents. Lucrezia is always within reach and always out of his grasp and this, he thinks, is how it will always be.

The divorce proceedings are lingering and she walks around the house like a spy. 

"Are you sad, sis?" he asks, standing in her open doorway, "We'll try and do better with the next one."

She looks up from the magazines, the glossy pile spread across her bed. "There's always going to be another one, isn't there, Chez?"

He swallows and steps towards her, the door still open. Outside, the house is quiet. Another vacation, another empty lot of days for just the two of them. Lucrezia is wearing only a robe, tied loosely around her waist, golden hair all around, wild and lovely. He remembers he was blond as a child, for the first few years after her birth they looked properly alike the two of them, the catlike features and the blond hair and now, the faded resemblance would have to be pointed out. On the street, he thinks, he could be anyone. He could be her boyfriend even.

He swallows and nods.

Lucrezia spreads her legs, dangling off the end of the bed further apart and her brother moves to stand between them, hands coming up to slide against her skin. 

"I shouldn't mind another husband," she teases, tracing a hand against his chest. "As long as he was rich and perhaps, this time, handsome."

"Money is anthem, sis."

-

At his wedding, she wears a veil, a tiny lace affair attached to her hat and sits at her table and smokes, drinks, laughs. Her mouth is red and her eyes blue and her hair gold and the men flock to her like magpies. 

Cesare sits with his wife and holds her hand. For the first time, he feels as though he has lost though he doesn't exactly know what the game was.

"We were born in the wrong time," Lucrezia said to him once, voice old and melancholy, "We'd have been great as Romans, Chez."

"Wrong bodies, sis, surely."

But Lucrezia shook her head.

"I can't imagine being anyone else," she'd said and the not-even-for-them had gone unsaid.

They are Borgias and they worship like this and they pray like this, the religion of power, of money, of success.

They climb to the end, first Chez and then Lucrezia, first together and then separate but never fully apart.

She doesn't follow behind him forever. In time, they both come to miss that.


End file.
